1998 IMO Problems/Problem 2
Problem
In a competition, there are contestants and judges, where is an odd integer. Each judge rates each contestant as either “pass” or “fail”. Suppose is a number such that, for any two judges, their ratings coincide for at most contestants. Prove that .
Solution
Let stand for the number of judges who pass the th candidate. The number of pairs of judges who agree on the th contestant is then given by
where the inequality follows from AM-QM. Since is odd, is not divisible by and we can strengthen the inequality to
Letting stand for the number of instances where two judges agreed on a candidate, it follows that
The given condition on implies that
Therefore
which simplifies to
See Also
1998 IMO (Problems) • Resources | ||
Preceded by Problem 1 |
1 • 2 • 3 • 4 • 5 • 6 | Followed by Problem 3 |
All IMO Problems and Solutions |